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April 17, 2023

Boosting Security Posture with Email Integration

Protect your organization from cyber-attacks with a strong security strategy. Learn how to safeguard against threats targeting email, cloud apps, and beyond.
Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Dan Fein
VP, Product
Written by
Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email
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17
Apr 2023

On its own, Darktrace/Email™ stops attacks before they reach an employee’s inbox and considers both security teams and the employees themselves. But its value extends beyond email security, increased by its ability to integrate with the wider security ecosystem, including both Darktrace products and external tools. 

Darktrace’s understanding of you and your organization can be applied anywhere your company has data. This unifying approach to cyber security feeds AI outputs into each other, from threat prevention to detection and response, in order to harden the entire security posture autonomously and continuously. The AI also enriches other security solutions an organization has in place by both ingesting and sharing data. This degree of integration transforms a security stack so that it is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Integrating Beyond Email to Enhance Detection and Response 

Integrating email security with other areas of the digital estate bolsters defenses, while reducing required resources. With more data, security teams gain a better understanding of the security stack and how attacks move through the system.

Traditional security solutions do this by either manually aggregating inputs from various tools or using a SIEM without native integrations to collate data. In contrast, Darktrace’s integration provides real-time intelligence communications between products to inform security teams. 

For example, context of network activity can provide more holistic email security. There’s a strong correlation between the websites users visit and the people that they email, which means information like web traffic provides insight into email threats, and vice versa. 

If an organization receives an email from a strange new sender, that happens to be have been sent from a domain nobody has ever visited, that added context could influence the aggression levels of actions taken. Integrations with endpoint security extends this type of informed decision-making to remote environments. These examples highlight the patented power of Darktrace/Network™ and Darktrace/Endpoint™ when paired with email coverage. 

Diagram depicting the flow of email activity generated by Darktrace Email Security tool.
Figure 2. Darktrace/Email works with Darktrace/Network and Darktrace/Endpoint to generate email insights from web traffic and vice versa. 

Email activity is tied to cloud/SaaS application account activity in an even more direct way. In the case of an account takeover, a suspicious Microsoft 365 login becomes even more suspicious if it is followed by highly unusual email activity, like new inbox rules being created. Too many email security solutions focus on the inbox alone, but viewing these areas in a single scope is critical for security teams wanting to understand the full timeline of an incident. 

To this end, Darktrace creates a 360-degree view of each user and their behavior. This comprehensive view goes beyond native security monitoring tools, allowing security teams to identify instances of data exfiltration, human error, misdirected emails, inappropriate link sharing, unusual log activity, and more. 

In one real-life example, the security team saw an attack from both an email and a SaaS perspective to quickly understand the whole picture, thanks to Darktrace/Email and Darktrace/Apps™. 

Darktrace customers are getting significant value from this integrated security stack. “The whole suite of products has given us 100% visibility across our whole ecosystem, which is fantastic. A lot of times we need to use many products to do that, and with the Darktrace products, I have that all in one,” commented a vice president of enterprise security and fraud management at a major credit union. 

Siloed solutions are a massive pain point in the cyber industry. Most companies have several, layered tools in their security stacks. When there is little to no communication between them, the security team must contend with an inflated workload and misses out on value. They must learn how to navigate several different dashboards, translate between languages and terms, and manually correlate data, in addition to monitoring all the solutions daily. This process makes maintaining security more difficult for the team, especially in a threat landscape with increasingly complex and fast-paced attacks. 

By sending and collecting information to and from other tools that the security team already uses, whether they are a part of Darktrace’s product stack or not, Darktrace/Email optimizes workflows so security teams can reallocate resources to larger, more strategic projects.  

Collaborating Across Email Security and Cyber Risk Management Tools

Syncing email protections with cyber risk management tools even further reduces risk and hardens security.

When emails are received from domain names associated with the brand of the client, an attack surface management tool can automatically analyze if those domains should be included as part of the attack surface scope or trigger malicious domain responses. 

In the other direction, when the attack surface management tool identifies malicious assets, like suspicious domains, spoofing sites, and typo squatters, it can inform email security decisions. With integrations between tools, these malicious assets automatically become watched domains with heightened sensitivity for inbound email. 

This integrated risk reduction can occur internally as well. When security teams look at cyber risk from an internal perspective, they may identify attack paths and high value targets within the company’s digital estate. By leveraging this understanding, Darktrace can determine which employees are critical components of potential attack paths. Once determined, the AI can test them by creating phishing simulations using details like real-life communication patterns and calendar data. These tests generate insights that feed back into Darktrace/Email to harden the environment, for example by heightening sensitivity. 

This demonstrates the benefits of combining Darktrace/Email and Darktrace PREVENT™. As part of the Cyber AI Loop, these connections between email security and cyber risk management are made easy for the security team to understand and act on. One customer noted how this integration had improved its security team’s workflow.  

“The more you use of Darktrace, the better it can correlate on your behalf,” said a Chief Information Officer at a construction company. “That’s why we’re all in with Darktrace now. We now have a holistic Darktrace footprint, which benefits us because we have more of the modules working on our behalf and not having to do the correlations separately or in isolation.” 

Supporting Compatibility with External Security Solutions

Darktrace/Email also works together with external tools. In addition to its mature integration with email providers like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspaces, Darktrace/Email has an open architecture that makes it immensely flexible. It is both API-driven and compatible with syslog, so it can integrate with any security tool and feed into any SIEM or SOAR. 

This unlimited capacity for integration allows Darktrace to detect and respond to threats more precisely with access to more data, as well as reduce the security team’s time-to-meaning by putting all relevant information in a single pane of glass. 

Darktrace/Email is also part of the Darktrace Mobile App, so security teams can view notifications, reports, and remediation actions at any time, even on the go. In this way, Darktrace not only fits into the greater security posture, but also with employees’ day-to-day workflow. 

Finally, Darktrace/Email supports data exports. These translate and share the data it collects within the email environment, allowing the security team to communicate key takeaways generated by Darktrace/Email to anyone within the organization. It can export directly to Microsoft Excel, or any other data analytics tool. This is especially useful for security teams as they work with other departments like IT, compliance, finance, and more. 

Integrations Add Value to the Darktrace Partnership

While Darktrace/Email is a powerful tool on its own, a major source of its value comes from its compatibility with the rest of Darktrace, other tools, people, and processes. 

Deploying multiple Darktrace products builds a robust security ecosystem that enhances detection while breaking down silos and improving workflows, therefore enabling the security team to take on higher-level and more strategic work. By integrating with external tools, Darktrace not only increases its own value but also maximizes the return on investment of other security solutions a team already has.  

Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Dan Fein
VP, Product
Written by
Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

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December 3, 2025

Darktrace Named as a Leader in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security Platforms

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Darktrace is proud to be named as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security Platforms (ESP). We believe this recognition reflects what our customers already know: our product is exceptional – and so is the way we deliver it.

In July 2025, Darktrace was named a Customers’ Choice in the Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for Email Security, a distinction given to vendors who have scores that meet or exceed the market average for both axes (User Interest and Adoption, and Overall Experience). To us, both achievements are testament to the customer-first approach that has fueled our rapid growth. We feel this new distinction from Gartner validates the innovation, efficacy, and customer-centric delivery that set Darktrace apart.

A Gartner Magic Quadrant is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. CIOs and CISOs can use this research to make informed decisions about which email security platform can best accomplish their goals. We encourage our customers to read the full report to get the complete picture.

This acknowledgement follows the recent recognition of Darktrace / NETWORK, also designated a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Detection & Response and named the only Customers’ Choice in its category.

Why do we believe Darktrace is leading in the email security market?

Our relentless innovation which drives proven results  

At Darktrace we continue to push the frontier of email security, with industry-first AI-native detection and response capabilities that go beyond traditional SEG approaches. How do we do it?

  • With a proven approach that gets results. Darktrace’s unique business-centric anomaly detection catches advanced phishing, supply chain compromises, and BEC attacks – detecting them on average 13 days earlier than attack-centric solutions. That’s why 75% of our customers have removed their SEG and now rely on their native email security provider combined with Darktrace.
  • By offering comprehensive protection beyond the inbox. Darktrace / EMAIL goes further than traditional inbound filtering, delivering account and messaging protection, DLP, and DMARC capabilities, ensuring best-in-class security across inbound, outbound, and domain protection scenarios.  
  • Continuous innovation. We are ranked second highest in the Gartner Critical Capabilities research for core email security function, likely thanks to our product strategy and rapid pace of innovation. We’ve release major capabilities twice a year for nearly five years, including advanced AI models and expanded coverage for collaboration platforms.

We deliver exceptional customer experiences worldwide

Darktrace’s leadership isn’t just about excelling in technology, it’s about delivering an outstanding experience that customers value. Let’s dig into what makes our customers tick.

  • Proven loyalty from our base. Recognition from Gartner Peer Insights as a Customers’ Choice, combined with a 4.8-star rating (based on 340 reviews as of November 2025), demonstrates for us the trust of thousands of organizations worldwide, not just the analysts.  
  • Customer-first support. Darktrace goes beyond ticket-only models with dedicated account teams and award-winning service, backed by significant headcount growth in technical support and analytics roles over the past year.
  • Local expertise. With offices spanning continents, Darktrace is able to provide regional language support and tailored engagement from teams on the ground, ensuring personalized service and a human-first experience.

Darktrace enhances security stacks with a partner-first architecture

There are plenty of tools out there than encourage a siloed approach. Darktrace / EMAIL plays well with others, enhancing your native security provider and allowing you to slim down your stack. It’s designed to set you up for future growth, with:

  • A best-in-breed platform approach. Natively built on Self-Learning AI, Darktrace / EMAIL delivers deep integration with our / NETWORK, / IDENTITY, and / CLOUD products as part of a unified platforms – that enables and enhances comprehensive enterprise-wise security.
  • Optimized workflows. Darktrace integrates tightly with an extended ecosystem of security tools – including a strategic partnership with Microsoft enabling unified threat response and quarantine capabilities – bringing constant innovation to all of your SOC workflows.  
  • A channel-first strategy. Darktrace is making significant investments in partner-driven architectures, enabling integrated ecosystems that deliver maximum value and future-ready security for our customers.

Analyst recognized. Customer approved.  

Darktrace / EMAIL is not just another inbound email security tool; it’s an advanced email security platform trusted by thousands of users to protect them against advanced phishing, messaging, and account-level attacks.  

As a Leader, we believe we owe our positioning to our customers and partners for supporting our growth. In the upcoming years we will continue to innovate to serve the organizations who depend on Darktrace for threat protection.  

To learn more about Darktrace’s position as a Leader, view a complimentary copy of the Magic Quadrant report, register for the Darktrace Innovation Webinar on 9 December, 2025, or simply request a demo.

Gartner, Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security Platforms, Max Taggett, Nikul Patel, 3 December 2025

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Darktrace.

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Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

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December 2, 2025

Protecting the Experience: How a global hospitality brand stays resilient with Darktrace

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For the Global Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a leading experiential leisure provider, security is mission critical to protecting a business built on reputation, digital innovation, and guest experience. The company operates large-scale immersive venues across the UK and US, blending activity-driven hospitality with premium dining and vibrant spaces designed for hundreds of guests. With a lean, centrally managed IT team responsible for securing locations worldwide, the challenge is balancing robust cybersecurity with operational efficiency and customer experience.

Brand buzz attracts attention – and attacks

Mid-sized, fast-growing hospitality organizations face a unique risk profile. When systems go down in a venue, the impact is immediate: hundreds of disrupted guest experiences, lost revenue during peak hours, and potential long-term reputation damage. Each time the organization opened a new venue, the surge of marketing buzz attracted attention in local markets and waves of sophisticated cyberattacks, including:

Phishing campaigns leveraging brand momentum to lure employees into clicking on malicious links.

AI-enhanced impersonation using advanced techniques to create AI-generated video calls and deep-researched, contextualized emails  

Fake domains targeting leadership with AI-generated messages that contained insider context gleaned from public information.

“Our endpoint security and antivirus tools were powerless against these sophisticated AI-powered campaigns. We didn’t want to manage incidents anymore. We wanted to prevent them from ever happening.”  - Global CTO

Proactive, preventative security with Darktrace AI

The company’s cybersecurity vision was clear: “Proactive, preventative – that was our mandate,” said the CTO. With a lean and busy IT group, the business evaluated several security solutions using deep-dive workshops. Darktrace proved the best fit for supporting the organization’s proactive mindset, offering:

  • Autonomy without added headcount: Darktrace provided powerful AI-driven detection and autonomous response functions with minimal manual oversight required.
  • Modular adoption: The company could start with core email and network protection and expand into cloud and endpoint coverage, aligning spend with growth.
  • Partnership and responsiveness: “We wanted people we trust, respect, and know will show up when we need them. Darktrace did just that,” said the CTO.
  • Affordability at scale: Darktrace offered reasonable upfront costs plus predictable, sustainable economics as the company and IT infrastructure expanded.  

“The combination of AI capabilities, a scalable model, and a strong engagement team tipped the balance in Darktrace’s favor, and we have not been disappointed,” said the CTO.

Phased deployment builds trust

To minimize disruption to critical hospitality systems like global Point of Sales (POS) terminals and Audio-Visual (AV) infrastructure, deployment was phased:

  1. Observation and human-led response: Initially, Darktrace was deployed in detection-only mode. Alerts were manually reviewed.
  2. Incremental autonomous response: Darktrace Autonomous Response was enabled on select models, taking action on low-risk scenarios. Higher-risk subnets and devices remained under human control.
  3. Full autonomous coverage: With tuning and reinforcement, autonomous response was expanded across domains, trusted to take decisive action in real time. Analysts retained the ability to review and contextualize incidents.

“Darktrace managed the rollout through detailed, professional, and responsive project management – ensuring a smooth, successful adoption and creating a standardized cybersecurity playbook for future venue launches,” said the CTO.  

AI delivers the outcomes that matter  

Measurable efficiency replaces endless alerts

Darktrace autonomous response significantly decreased false alerts and noise. “If it’s quiet, we’re confident there isn’t a problem,” said the CTO. Within six months, Darktrace conducted 3,599 total investigations, detected and contained 320 incidents indicative of an attack, resolved 91% of those events autonomously, and escalated only 9% to human analysts. The efficiency gains were enormous, saving analysts 740 hours on investigations within a single month.  

Precision AI turns inbox chaos into calm

Darktrace Self-Learning AI modeled sender/recipient norms, content/linguistic baselines, and communication patterns unique to the organization’s launch cadence, resulting in:

  • Automated holds and neutralizations of anomalous executive-style messages
  • Rapid detection of novel templates and tone shifts that deviated from the organization’s lived email graph, even when indicators were not yet on any feed
  • Downstream reduction in help-desk escalations tied to suspicious email

Full visibility fuels real-time response

Darktrace gives IT direct visibility without extra licensing, and it surfaces ground truth across every venue, including:

  • Device geolocation and placement drift: Darktrace exposed devices and users operating outside approved zones, prompting new segmentation and access-control policies.
  • Guest Wi-Fi realities: Darktrace AI uncovered high-risk activity on guest networks, like crypto-mining and dark-web traffic, driving stricter VLAN separation and access hygiene.
  • Lateral-movement containment: Autonomous response fenced suspicious activity in real time, buying time for human investigation while keeping POS and AV systems unaffected.

Smarter endpoints for a smarter network

Endpoints once relied on static agents effective only against known signatures. Darktrace’s behavioral models now detect subtle anomalies at the endpoint process level that EDRs often miss, such as misuse of legitimate applications (commonly used in living-off-the-land attacks), unapproved application usage and policy violations. This increases the accuracy and fidelity of network-based investigations by adding endpoint process context alongside existing EDR alerts.

Autonomous response for continuous compliance

Across PCI, GDPR, and cross-border privacy obligations, Darktrace’s native evidencing is helping the team demonstrate control rather than merely assert it:

  • Asset and flow awareness: Knowing “what is where” and “who talks to what” underpins PCI scoping and data-flow diagrams.
  • Layered safeguards: Showing autonomous prevention, network segmentation, and rapid containment supports risk registers and control attestations.
  • Audit-ready artifacts: Investigations and autonomous actions produce artifacts that “tick the box” without additional tooling.  

Defining the next era of resilience with AI

With rapid global expansion underway, the company is using its cybersecurity playbook to streamline and secure future venue launches. In the near term, IT is focused on strengthening prevention, using Darktrace insights to guide new policy updates and infrastructure changes like imposing stricter guest-network posture and refining venue device baselines.

For tech leaders charting their path to proactive cyber defense, the CTO stresses success won’t come from sidestepping AI, but from turning it into a core capability.

“AI isn’t optional – it’s operational. The real risk to your business is trying to out-scale automated adversaries with human speed alone. When applied to the right use case, AI becomes a catalyst for efficiency, resilience, and business growth.” - Global CTO
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